Mountains of millions out of a molehill

Damn. There I was, fired up to begin this column with a snappy rewrite of Old Macdonald Had a Farm, only to find myself gazumped by Herald readers on the letters page.

I can't better them so we move on, although with some difficulty. Sir Lunchalot is a tough act to follow. His testimony at the Independent Commission Against Corruption has rocketed beyond the reach of parody or satire. The skies above are dark with flying pigs, squadrons of them soaring and swooping in the airy blue, snouts greasy from the slops of the public trough.

''I'm pretty good at geography,'' the former resources minister assured his interrogator, the relentless Geoffrey Watson, SC. You betcha. The state of NSW boasts an area of 809,444 square kilometres and 69 recognised mountain peaks, from the familiar Mt Kosciuszko to lesser-known pointy bits such as Mt Hopeless near Oberon and Mt Warning south-west of Murwillumbah.

Mt Penny is not listed among them. Yet, from the upholstered seclusion of his ministerial office, Lunchalot employed a piercing intuition beyond the powers of lesser mortals to divine that this dot on his atlas was the ideal site for a coal mine. His public servants were instructed to make it so. Imagine his astonishment when he found out - apparently from reading the Fairfax press - that the obscure hillock was smack-bang in the middle of the country seat of his old mate Eddie Obeid. Mt Penny suddenly became Mt Millions. Porkies 12 o'clock high, blue leader.

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The commissioner, David Ipp, will make his findings in due course, but the rest of us are entitled to an opinion as well. If you believe the evidence of the Obeid gang and Lunchalot himself, then I have a harbour bridge and an opera house I can let you have very cheaply.

***

Geoffrey Watson's opening allusion to the wicked old NSW Rum Corps is instructive. I did some digging.

Officially known as the 102nd Regiment of Foot, but actually the dregs of the British Army, the Rum Corps plunged headlong into crime and corruption in the infant colony, laying the foundations for that long and crooked line of colourful Sydney business figures and shonky property developers with us still today.

Its commanding officer was Major Francis Grose, who succeeded Arthur Phillip as acting governor in 1792. The ship carrying the honest but ailing Phillip back to England had barely cleared the Heads before Grose was parcelling out hefty land grants to his officers, assigning convict labour to work their farms, and giving them the green light to traffic in imported rum.

The next year, 11 officers chartered a ship, the Britannia, and landed a cargo of rum which cost them five shillings a gallon. After watering it down by a quarter, they flogged it to free settlers, soldiers and convicts alike for 30 shillings a gallon, a nice little earner if ever there was. Rum became the currency of the colony, the officer corps ran the trade as a monopoly, and many an honest man was ruined by it.

Successive governors, all naval officers, were powerless to curb these redcoat thugs. It ended in tears with the infamous Rum Rebellion of 1808, that military coup d'etat masterminded by the sheep farmer and bootleg liquor distiller John Macarthur. A rabble of soldiery, led by the drunkard Major George Johnston, deposed Governor William Bligh and clapped him under house arrest. The joint was run by a military junta until the arrival of Lachlan Macquarie in December 1809.

If this sounds to you not entirely dissimilar to the latter-day workings of the NSW branch of the Labor Party, you may well have a point. An email from a true believer nailed it this week:

''Labor swill indeed,'' he wrote. ''These pricks took over the party I have loved since I was old enough to realise the humanist ideals I profess. I have stood on cold, rain-swept street corners on more occasions than I can count. I have even shed blood, on occasion, but not for that lot … ''

There goes the federal election, then.

***

Any day now I expect that the toothy and inescapable Tom Waterhouse will be opening a book on the next Pope. They already have in Britain, where cardinals from Canada, Ghana and Nigeria are streeting the field to succeed Benedict XVI.

The hot favourite is Marc Ouellet, 68, a former archbishop of Quebec and now Vatican uber-bureaucrat, who's at odds of 5-2 with the London turf accountant Paddy Power. The dark horse in the race - if you'll pardon an excruciating and utterly tasteless pun - is Cardinal Peter Turkson, 64, a Ghanaian who is also a powerful insider in Rome and widely thought to be foreman material, or papabile, as they say.

A quick bit of googling suggests that Turkson has been campaigning for the gig for years. He has been all over the place and, lo and behold, he even popped up on the ABC's 7.30 on Wednesday to say how terrific it would be if God were to select a black African pope. And guess who. If the Lord was watching, He can be in no doubt that Turkson modestly sees himself as the man for the job. Turkson had the impenetrable banality of papal pronouncements off pat. ''We need to get back to being transparent to the power of the gospel again,'' he rumbled to a deeply respectful interviewer. Perhaps it sounds better in Latin, but I haven't a clue what he meant, and I doubt that he did either. This is the Tony Abbott of the College of Cardinals.

The push for an African pontiff has a certain logic to it. The Catholic faith in Europe, North America and Australia remains bogged in endless paedophile scandals. Benedict himself was tainted by his part in the cover-up, however much his apologists protest otherwise. A Pope from Africa might make the clean break that the church so desperately needs.

I imagine you would get fairly long odds against a female pope. Surely there must be a devout and talented woman amongst the world's 1 billion Catholics who could step up to the throne of Peter, but something tells me it won't be this time.

It will be a while yet before they send pink smoke up the Sistine chimney.